Today, many operating systems can be booted from a portable external storage device, such as a direct attached storage device. For example, the Microsoft Windows 8, supports “Windows To Go.” Windows To Go allows a portable storage drive to be imaged with a full bootable operating system. This allows the portable storage drive to be plugged into virtually any computer and run its image.
In order to image a portable drive, it is connected to a host device, such as a personal computer or server and imaged with an imaging application or tool, such as ImageX. Unfortunately, the provisioning process has been found to take considerable time, e.g., several hours. For an enterprise seeking to image large numbers of drives, this amount of time is a significant disadvantage. Therefore, it would be desirable to optimize or reduce the amount of time needed to create bootable storage device.